It is widely known and accepted that thoroughly chewing food, i.e. high chew counts, can have a number of positive health benefits. For example, high chew counts can aid in digestion, and people that thoroughly chew their food tend to eat in smaller portions than people that do not. Accordingly, individuals, health insurance companies, and government agencies have interest in tools, in particular low cost tools that can monitor chew counts to help people maintain healthy eating habits.
Current tools can analyze a captured video of a subject chewing and count the number of chews by segmenting a portion of the subject's frontal face and performing a frequency analysis. However, such complex methods are particularly sensitive to different views of the head and noise, particularly when using low quality video due to the quasiperiodic or aperiodic nature of chewing motions. Accordingly, frequency analyses by segmenting portions of a subject's face can yield inaccurate results.
Therefore, there is a need for a simplified chew-counting tool that can use low-cost technologies, such as a standard video camera, and effectively and accurately extract a chew count from a video.